The physical manifestation of perseverance: waiting. I suck at waiting. It’d be easier if it were less like the lottery, and more like eating at Denny’s.
Here’s what I mean:
At Denny’s you order something like a “Grand Slam” breakfast or Bullalo Wings. The waitress asks the required, applicable, “Would you like white, wheat, rye, or sourdough bread with that?” And you tell her what you want. 20 minutes later she arrives with your food and you take it and eat it. If it isn’t what you ordered then you tell your kind (hopefully) waitress and ask for the correction to take place. And there you have it.
The lottery, on the other hand, is different. You buy your ticket and you have absolutely NO idea what you’re getting. It could be a winner, it could be a loser. If you lose…then TOO BAD! No money back, you must take your loss and swallow your debt.
As a gambler I have bad luck, not that I make a habit of gambling. Sometimes, however, waiting feels like gambling.
Jacob leaves home because he deceived his dad, and took advantage of his jock big brother. He wanders out of town into a new town. He meets this girl, she’s beautiful. He finds out her dad owns livestock, so he works out an acceptable deal with her dad. In the day it was cool to say, “Hey, I want your daughter, so can I earn her by working on your farm?” [If only it was so easy nowadays] So Jacob worked to earn the hand of the girl of his dreams, Rachel. But here’s the catch: to earn her hand he has to work SEVEN years. So he does. He sticks it out. Then finally at the end of 7 years it’s time to finally get married. Big wedding, all the bling that you could imagine. In that day the wife wore a vale until the wedding night. On the wedding night Jacob and his new wife checked in to their honeymoon suite, and to Jacob’s shock he learned that he married the wrong person!!! The father tricked him into marrying Rachel’s older sister Leah! AHHH! So, since it was acceptable in that day, Jacob worked another 7 years to earn the hand of Rachel…the girl he wanted in the first place. Jacob’s experience in waiting is the most brutal instance. 14 years of hard work to get what he was waiting for, and the trail along the way was littered with disappointments and tears.
Why doesn’t anyone like waiting? A traffic jam is not made up of people excited to wait, it’s made up of people trying to get home (or to their destination) as fast as humanly possible. No one makes the pilgrimage to Disney Land to wait in line, and the purpose behind the grocery store is to eat dinner, not wait in line. Funny thing in waiting (that I’ll repeat until the day I die): When we (humans) wait until the last moment it’s called procrastination, but when God does it it’s called perfect timing. I think waiting sucks because it means I’m not in charge. But it’s funny, standing back and looking at the decisions that the waiting involves, it makes me NOT want to be in charge. I mean, do I really want “to be in charge” of my future? I’d rather trust the all-sufficiency of the Creator of the Universe for that one. And the point with waiting? I don’t think waiting is meant to drive us crazy, I believe waiting is meant to develop trust and perseverance in our hearts. God used Jacob to play a significant part in birthing a Nation. See, God’s plan was bigger than Jacob’s. Jacob wanted a wife, God wanted to use the situation for something of historical proportions.
So my hand shaking towards Heaven gently opens to form a palm facing upwards, as I join the chorus in Heaven to declare that there’s none like my Creator. He knows what He’s doing. His ways are much higher than mine. And His timing is too.